D&D General Railroads, Illusionism, and Participationism

[Cadence]

There is nothing inherently distinctive about terrain, and geography, and architecture, in comparison to the dodginess of Orcs vis-a-vis particular sorts of attacks, that means that one method of establishing authorship and resolving actions is inherently apt to one and not the other.

I've never played in a LARP, but it feels like having an npc orc be differentially dodgy based on the pcs choice of attack would be easier to implement than having new rooms or obstacles appear because the in-character player remembered them being there.

In a play, are the parts for each actor of a different type than the stage descriptions?

When playing Minecraft, is playing in survival mode effectively a different game than playing in survival mode except that you are allowed to pop over to creative and spawn new mobs or new structures when you want?

 

[Cadence]

I don't know what value you'd take from this. I'd never run an AP straight with no prep, though, because I tend to find that I hit places where the AP's writers and I violently clash and it actually is seriously unfun for me. The opening to Descent is a great example of something that if I ran it straight I'd probably say, after a few moments of play, "you know what, guys, I ain't feeling this crap. Let's pull out a boardgame or something."

The 5e DMG seems to definitely be on your side as far as not running them with no modifications!

DMG pg. 72 has three paragraphs on published adventures:

• make adjustments to published adventures so that they better suit your campaign and appeal to your players
• published adventures can't account for every action characters might take
• you might not use it as a single adventure, but use it for inspiration instead

The only WotC adventure I have is Yawning Portal, and the "Placing the Adventure" and/or "Adventure Hooks" blurbs for each part don't go very far at emphasizing the points in the three DMG paragraphs. I'm guessing the full book length published modules don't either.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I've never played in a LARP, but it feels like having an npc orc be differentially dodgy based on the pcs choice of attack would be easier to implement than having new rooms or obstacles appear because the in-character player remembered them being there.

In a play, are the parts for each actor of a different type than the stage descriptions?

When playing Minecraft, is playing in survival mode effectively a different game than playing in survival mode except that you are allowed to pop over to creative and spawn new mobs or new structures when you want?

LARPs are played in the real world, so creation of a new space is an impossibility due to the limitation that we can't instantiate new spaces in the real world on a moment. This is a poor analogy that misses the features of what a shared fictional play space entails.

Same with plays, but here you can point to improv which, yes, differs in exactly the way you posit.

And same with Minecraft -- unless you're saying your D&D game is a procedure algorithm that generates a world via a random seed and where play is solely to manipulate the generated world in accordance with a strict and unbreakable set of rules and that DW is actually creative mode where you can freely break many of these rules?

In other words, these comparisons are just terrible, man. Like nowhere near good. The Minecraft one breaks normal D&D games, even, where the GM has to make a call or make something up on the spot for play!

 

[Ovinomancer]

The 5e DMG seems to definitely be on your side as far as not running them with no modifications!

DMG pg. 72 has three paragraphs on published adventures:

• make adjustments to published adventures so that they better suit your campaign and appeal to your players
• published adventures can't account for every action characters might take
• you might not use it as a single adventure, but use it for inspiration instead

The only WotC adventure I have is Yawning Portal, and the "Placing the Adventure" and/or "Adventure Hooks" blurbs for each part don't go very far at emphasizing the points in the three DMG paragraphs. I'm guessing the full book length published modules don't either.

They do not. And my modifications are significantly larger than most because I have a lower tolerance for some kinds of play than appears to be the average. And I say this because of how popular these books are. Perhaps, though, there is a market for finish-it-yourself kits where not all of the parts are even provided and the ones that are there don't really work as advertised? I dunno.

But, on the nature of the pg 72 advice, it doesn't really say much. The advice is vague and not operationally useful -- make adjustments? What kind? How should I be doing this? Why? Where? The second bullet is already present in the basic play loop, but the modules still have moments where they explicitly tell the GM to make this thing happen no matter what, so it's pointless advice for these moments as it's overridden by the modules. The third bullet is truly unimportant. So, we have vague advice with no help, weird advice, and irrelevant advice -- for running an AP at least.

 

[Cadence]

LARPs are played in the real world, so creation of a new space is an impossibility due to the limitation that we can't instantiate new spaces in the real world on a moment. This is a poor analogy that misses the features of what a shared fictional play space entails.

Same with plays, but here you can point to improv which, yes, differs in exactly the way you posit.

And same with Minecraft -- unless you're saying your D&D game is a procedure algorithm that generates a world via a random seed and where play is solely to manipulate the generated world in accordance with a strict and unbreakable set of rules and that DW is actually creative mode where you can freely break many of these rules?

In other words, these comparisons are just terrible, man. Like nowhere near good. The Minecraft one breaks normal D&D games, even, where the GM has to make a call or make something up on the spot for play!

They were in response to "There is nothing inherently distinctive about terrain, and geography, and architecture, in comparison to the dodginess of Orcs vis-a-vis particular sorts of attacks,"

In the first two examples, LARPS, and plays, and I would guess other places in life, do human beings in general distinguish regularly distinguish between the terrain, geography, and architecture, and the things like themselves or other creatures? Does that shape their mental processes in ways that would influence how they view things it ttrpgs that don't have the physical constraints of LARPS, plays, and real life?

Does that carry over into how video games are structured? Do some of them have modes where the player goes through a world (I guess in some with an AP version and a sandbox version once you finish) and then also have the mode where you can hack and modify them? Are those two modes viewed as two different things?

 

[Cadence]

They do not. And my modifications are significantly larger than most because I have a lower tolerance for some kinds of play than appears to be the average. And I say this because of how popular these books are. Perhaps, though, there is a market for finish-it-yourself kits where not all of the parts are even provided and the ones that are there don't really work as advertised? I dunno.

But, on the nature of the pg 72 advice, it doesn't really say much. The advice is vague and not operationally useful -- make adjustments? What kind? How should I be doing this? Why? Where? The second bullet is already present in the basic play loop, but the modules still have moments where they explicitly tell the GM to make this thing happen no matter what, so it's pointless advice for these moments as it's overridden by the modules. The third bullet is truly unimportant. So, we have vague advice with no help, weird advice, and irrelevant advice -- for running an AP at least.

I wonder if (sadly) that's more advice on customizing modules than any of the previous DMGs have.

In any case, I wonder how much would need to be given in the DMG, and in the module front matter, to make a difference? Is there any way to organize big hardcover printed modules to make it easy to hack? (Having every other page blank to write on feels like it would be cool if it was one of the old floppy modules ... but would feel really different if it was a big hardcover). Would giving a pdf file that was easy to edit actually be something that would help?

 

[Ovinomancer]

They were in response to "There is nothing inherently distinctive about terrain, and geography, and architecture, in comparison to the dodginess of Orcs vis-a-vis particular sorts of attacks,"

In a shared fictional space, there isn't. Having to change venues seems like a tacit admission of this.

In the first two examples, LARPS, and plays, and I would guess other places in life, do human beings in general distinguish regularly distinguish between the terrain, geography, and architecture, and the things like themselves or other creatures? Does that shape their mental processes in ways that would influence how they view things it ttrpgs that don't have the physical constraints of LARPS, plays, and real life?

Dude. I covered this earlier. People in real life also don't check in with Bob to find out where they see mountains. You're taking a real life thing and imagining it's the same when you're asking Bob to provide these details. It's just as weird to think Bob's the source of reality as it is to think your character, who supposedly lives in this world, already knows something about the mountains and we can test that to see if it's true.

Does that carry over into how video games are structured? Do some of them have modes where the player goes through a world (I guess in some with an AP version and a sandbox version once you finish) and then also have the mode where you can hack and modify them? Are those two modes viewed as two different things?

Sigh. You're bringing up a game with ruleset X and then the same game but changed to ruleset Y which is more permissive than X, and saying that this difference means there's a difference between imagining a forge and imaging an orc being hit with a sword. The process of imagining these things is the same, it's only the details of the imaging that are different. We can look at this in games and note that we're all imagining things, but we're agreeing to imagine the same things in a shared spaced. The process of imagining a thing still is the same, we're just going to put rules in place about who and when things can be imagined and constraints on what can be imagined at a given moment of play. What's imagined here is kinda unimportant to the process of play, the distributions of authorities to imagine, and the constraints on the imagining. It's in this situation that we can look at what happens and see that there's great similarity between 5e where the GM is constrained by the system in combat and DW where the GM is constrained by the system for a given move -- both are constrained by the system's say.

To make this a proper comparison in minecraft -- blocks are placed from player inventory the same way regardless of what block is being placed -- and whether you're in creative or survival.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I wonder if (sadly) that's more advice on customizing modules than any of the previous DMGs have.

I don't think so. 4e has better advice.

In any case, I wonder how much would need to be given in the DMG, and in the module front matter, to make a difference? Is there any way to organize big hardcover printed modules to make it easy to hack? (Having every other page blank to write on feels like it would be cool if it was one of the old floppy modules ... but would feel really different if it was a big hardcover). Would giving a pdf file that was easy to edit actually be something that would help?

Given my experience the answer to the second question is no. It takes time and effort, even if you're experienced and looking for shortcuts. The entire purpose of a published module is to reduce GM prep work. That I find this to be the opposite -- I spend more time in prep with published stuff than my own stuff -- is counterintuitive. However, I'm not the normal customer for these products. There are many players that run these straight off the page and enjoy the experience. I can tolerated it as a player, depending on company, but I cannot tolerate it as a GM.

 

[Blue]

I think a point of difference about the forge is the expectations coming into it based on the game. A D&D DM may have a map of an area, so "adding in a forge where there wasn't" is the default position when they hear something like this, and retconning the map is not something they are accustomed to.

But in PbtA, you play to find out. So it's not that there is no forge and suddenly one appears, but that it's undefined and there being a forge or not are both possible outcomes based on the play.

Now, the Principles in various PbtA games usually have something along the lines of "say what honesty demands" - so retconning a forge into a place that already has been established in play as forge-less won't happen. Just like in D&D, there's no change to what has been defined. It's just that the D&D DM is used to being established with that map, which has no dwarven forges on it, while the PbtA GM has Schrödinger's area, where only places that have been established in play are in a defined state.

To give a real world D&D example, I don't map out every building in cities. I usually hit a website that gives me nice maps. From there I determine some important buildings, and likely have districts where I have idea of the types of neighborhoods and what's there. If asked "are there any inns nearby", that would start in an undefined state for me if nothing had been previously detailed. The idea that a player could have their character chime in "I think I saw one a few streets back, the 'something Boar Rest' if I recall." is not abhorrent to D&D. That's the same sort of thing as the dwarven forge, (though in this case not even gated behind a check).

So part of the issue here is the assumptions at start of play, where in some types of games a convention exists that would define maps ahead of time, and in another type of game there's a convention not to have that prepped ahead of time and "play to find out" applying to everyone, not just the players.

 

[Malmuria]

Sure. Let me ask, though, what changes are made to the adventure of, say, Storm King's Thunder, if you have a paladin in the party vice a barbarian? Does the plot change? Which scenes change? Does a motivation change for an NPC? Or are all of these the same?

This is quite a reductive view of fiction! Take any story--A Tale of Two Cities, Star Wars, Parable of the Sower--keep the setting and the minor characters, but change the protagonists. Give them different personalities, motivations, and skill sets. Would the story change in a pretty fundamental way? Probably!

In an RPG, and adventure path provides some of the elements of a story, but it is incomplete. To make it complete, it requires characters. Who those characters are, the choices they make, and who they become can significantly alter the end story. How and the degree to which the adventure changes will depend on the style and temperament of the group.

It would be like describing Lord of the Rings by saying "Well there was this evil ring and yada yada yada some people (doesn't matter who, could've been anybody) threw it in a fire and the world was saved." The journey is the whole story!